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A quote has been floating around in print and online publications for years that, in many instances, has been attributed to writer Mark Twain. The quote is this, If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper you are misinformed. (Screenshot, azquotes.com) We found no evidence Mark Twain was the originator of this statement. Quote Investigator Garson O'Toole also found no instances in which this quote or any like it came from Twain. According to the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, a private institution in Elmira, New York, lazy newspaper columnists began slinging the saying around and attributing it to Mark Twain in 2007, for reasons that remain unclear. The irony of the legendary humorist's name being spuriously used under these circumstances wasn't lost on the Center's Twain apocrypha page: Quote Investigator found variations of the statement going back centuries, with one example using different wording but expressing a similar sentiment in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson in 1807: There's no evidence Twain made the statement — but quotes misattributed on the internet to famous people is a common occurrence. For example, some falsely attributed a quote that appeared to address cancel culture, a fixture of early 21st century internet discourse, to 19th-century Russian literary giant Fyodor Dostoevsky.
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